THE CURRENT RELEVANCE OF REALIST DISCOURSE
THE CURRENT RELEVANCE OF REALIST DISCOURSE

Summary/Abstract: The paper focuses the idea of realism by explaining the evident situation that the realist approach is the oldest of Western art practices, which – running in parallel to other currents – has extended into the second half of the twentieth century and even further. The discussion expands beyond literature to other arts. The starting point is the notion of literary realism after 1830 as used in literary history linked to the “great” novelistic tradition. In the twentieth century, the status of literary realism with its varieties of late and “neo-” realisms turns problematic. The reconsidered idea of realism unequivocally renounces links with the scholarly traditions explaining realism as “representation” or “reflection” etc. of the objective reality. The “debate on expressionism” in the 1930s and the avant-garde movements – in some of its tendencies – are an extension of the realist movement. The reconsidered view on realism is founded on the concept of the archive, increasing in importance on the theoretical level and in various poetics throughout the twentieth century. (However, Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory, though it could be considered a variant of the theory of archive, falls outside the limits of realism.) The paper argues for the discursive definition of realism, advanced by Hans Vilmar Geppert on the ground of Peirce's pragmaticism, avoiding the pitfalls of traditional approaches to realism.

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